Parlour Songs -- "The foundations of the drawing-room genre"

Speranza

-- D. B. Scott.

The multifaceted edifice of Victorian bourgeois (or wealthy upper middle class) popular song (or ballad) was built upon foundations laid in the eighteenth century.

The most important of these were three:

-- the Italian and English "opera": opera, qua Italian genre of theatrical music, had been impoted by the Aristocracy and first flourished in the "Italian Opera House" as the Haymarket Theatre was informally called, and later at the more pretentious "Royal Italian Opera" at Covent Garden.

--  the collections of arrangements of'traditional airs' and

-- the table entertainments pioneered by Charles Dibdin, of "Poor Tom" (or the Sailor's Epitaph) fame.

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The not insignificant part played by non-conformist hymns will give birth to the 'sacred balld'. elsewhere.

The  influence in mid-century of Afro-American music was also important.

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Bourgeois upper middle class ballad is obviously indebted to non-bourgeois ARISTOCRATIC musical practice and ballad repertoire, and to the cosmopolitan musical character of eighteenth-century London: Queen Anne founded the Haymarket Theatre.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the London rich merchants aped the manners of the upper class -- landed gentry and the Italian-opera loving aristocracy.

An interest in the Italian opera patronized by the Aristocracy (and Landed Gentry) is a proof of social distinction for the upwardly mobile.

Hogarth satirizes this behaviour and depicted in his "Marriage a la Mode" (1745).

A merchant's daughter aspires to upper-class values by listening to an Italian castrato opera singer as she collects 'decadent' art objects.

The royal "court" (as in the Camerata di Bardi in 1600s Florence, around the Medicis) remains the focal point of musical activity during the reign of George II.

However, the first regular series of PUBLIC subscription concerts started in 1729, at Hickford's Room, in James Street.

The aristocracy and the nobility inherites a music tradition almost completely bound to either the court ceremonial or the church liturgy.

The court ceremonial is important when we remember that the first examples of Italian opera back in 1600s Florence were commissions for weddings: Orfeo, Dafne, and the rest of them.

It was only in Venice that opera became 'commercial' (via Mantova).

In the early 1700s, the aristocracy (familiar with the Grand Tour to Italy) supplement it all by importing ITALIAN OPERA -- of the "seria" variety, as it were.

In general, 'opera buffa' was held to be inferior and for the mobs.

It was the flowering of ITALIAN OPERA in Naples, which occurred slightly later than in Venice, which provides the model for imitation in London (as well as Hanover and Vienna, to name a few)


IL TRIONFO DI CAMILLA, REGINA DI VOLSCI

The most popular of all Italian operas in London, "Il Trionfo di Camilla, Regina di Volsci", was originally written for Naples in 1696 by Giovanni Bononcini (of "Tweedledee" fame).

This was before Henry Purcell's experiments, which never attracted much of the snobbish aristocratic taste, like the sublime "Dido and Aeneas".

"Il trionfo di Camilla, regina di Volsci" received 111 performances from 1706-28.

But it was always either completely in English -- or in a mixture of English and Italian.

Addison has elaborated on this.

It was felt more natural to allow the Italian singers (illiterate as some of this Neapolitan castrati were) to air their airs in their vernacular rather than murder a subtle English lyric (the castrati cannot pronounce English vowels or consonants).

"Il trionfo di Camilla, regina di Volsci",  therefore, in spite of its Italianate title, comes to be considered an "English" opera.

"Il trionfo di Camilla" had hast concluded a successful run in the "English" Opera Season at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre before "The Beggar's Opera" opened there in 1728.


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The enormous success of Gay/Pepusch's The Beggar's Opera" (1728) a work pointedly intended to appeal to the middle (rather than the upper) class, demonstrates the potential size of the new middle-class (rather than aristocratic) audience for a composer who, like Handel, would be willing to make appropriate concessions.

The Italian Bononcini (better known as "Tweedledee") abstains from pursuing this opportunity.

Bononcini, as many other Italians settled in London, are more inclined towards the private concerts of the aristocracy in Britain and Europe.

The work which established ITALIAN OPERA in its native tongue in London was Handel's "Rinaldo" (1711) -- cfr. Gay, "Let Us Take The Road" -- drawn from Torquato Tasso.

London is now a cosmopolitan town, the home of many ITALIAN musicians.

Handel himself, as a German who acquires fame (and money) writing ITALIAN operas for the English, personally testifies to this cosmopolitan character of the city of London.

Aaron Hill, the director of the theatre in the "Italian Opera House", Haymarket, concocts a libretto from bits of Tasso and Ariosto.

Hill suggests that Handel set it to music when he met him in London on his first visit to England.

Handel agrees so it was speedily translated into Italian by one Giacomo Rossi.

Handel is successful in providing ARISTOCRATIC entertainment, for the royalty, nobility and landed gentry.

Handel's real sympathies, however, lies with the English bourgeoisie

Although Handel received royal patronage, he never holds an official court position.

Handel is often out of favour with certain members of the aristocracy whose resentment becomes overt when they organize a rival 'Opera of the Nobility' in 1734 -- led by Porpora, and wholly performed in ITALIAN.

During the 1700s, Handel is increasingly aware of the possibility that a large commercial public might be catered for by a "new" art-form.

The public reactions to Gay's "Beggar's Opera" and Carey and Lampe's burlesque "The Dragon of Wantley" (1737) -- a parody on Handel's "Giustino" and Farinelli -- show widespread SCORN for Italian "opera seria" which was damaging Handel's box-office receipts. Add to that the competition from the Opera of the Nobility.

Handel's solution is to blend

(a) the *music* of ITALIAN OPERA
(b) he German Passion, and
(c) the English choral tradition

-- to create an original and eventually highly successful hybrid, the English "oratorio".

In Italy, the term "oratorio" means, more or less, a concert performance of a sacred opera during Lent, when the Pope decrees that opera houses are to be closed (the original 'oratorio' in Rome, where "Anima e Corpo" was performed in 1600).

Handel pleases the middle (rather than the upper) class by using ENGLISH (and not Italian) as the language of his oratorios.

Also, the old biblical subject matter is more to the middle-class taste than that of the Italian opera seria -- which rather appeals to the classicists and Grand Tourists

In a period of expanding empire, it was easy to identify with God's chosen people and their heaven-sent victories.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the major European countries are engaged in commercial wars for the control of over-seas markets.

Britain's sea-power was crucial,.

It is thus no surprise to learn that the patriotic song 'Rule, Britannia!' dates from this time (1740) -- from Arne's masque, "King Alfred" -- and to be parodied by the Tommies during the Great War. "Marmalade and Jam".

By the end of the Seven Years War (1763) Britain outstrips her rivals in the building of a colonial empire and securs both North America -- "The American Colonies", or "The Colonies in the New World" -- and India.

The traditional court composer's commemoration of a victory is a work like Handel's "Dettingen Te Deum", written to celebrate the fortunate outcome of the last great charge in British history led by the King himself, at the battle of Dettingen in 1743 -- the king's horse having accidentally bolted in the direction of the enemy.

Now, Handel also has an alternative means of response to national conflict and choses to celebrate the victory over the forces of feudalism at Culloden, in an oratorio, "Judas Maccabeus" (1746) -- from where the familiar hymn tune, "JUDAS MACCABAEUS" (originally "Joshua") comes -- "See the conqu'ring hero comes".

Prince Charlie is the grandson of the dethroned monarch James II, and the focal point of pro-Stuart sympathy among the aristocracy.

The true patriot is called upon to reject feudalism in the cause of establishing a middle-class democracy.

It is ironic that an old song revitalized for the cause in the 1740s, "God Save our Gracious King', originally refers to 'the king over the water' -- still suggested by the odd phrasing,
"send him victorious"

-- and in an early version the epithet 'true-born'.

Handel identifies with the aims of middle-class (rather than upper class) liberals, having for ever turned his back on feudal Germany and become naturalized as English in 1726.

The oratorio of "Judas Maccabeus" (and first "Joshua") catches the bourgeois mood and is to be one of his most regularly performed pieces ("See the conqu'ring hero comes")

The English are represented by the Israelites who are fighting a Roman aristocracy, and the Duke of Cumberland (alias 'the butcher') is undoubtedly intended for comparison with the divinely favoured eponymous hero: Maccabeus. (Oddly, Handel borrowed his famous march from an earlier oratorio, on the ancient prophet "Joshua").

It is worth while pondering the kind of freedom for which English soldiers are being asked to sacrifice their lives, if need be.

The agrarian revolution destroys the ancient village communities, and the system of co-operative husbandry is eplaced by individual farming.

Furthermore, the effect of the Enclosure Movement is to dispossess small tenants and cottagers in the interests of capitalist farmers.

The result of political reformation means that people are more and more bound together by self-interest rather than gaining freedom.

The liberty being fought for was the freedom to sell one's own labour-power or hire that of others, depending on whether one owns or has been stripped of property.

After the suppression of the '45 rebellion, the Highland chiefs are, in Dr Johnson's description, changed from patriarchal rulers to rapacious land-lords.

In the later eighteenth century, enforced clearances took place in the Highlands to make room for profitable sheep-farming.

The rightness of the Protestant religion is strongly hinted at in the Rev. Morell's libretto (despite the obvious anomaly that the Israelites worship a tribal deity), with the anti-papist slant of the cries of 'down with the polluted altars' and the recommendation to hurl 'priests and pageants' to 'the remotest corner of the world' in order to avoid deception by 'pious lies'

The enemy Rome also suggests Catholicism and its association with the Jacobite cause.

Performers in oratorio, of course, were not under the same suspicion of popery as those in Italian OPERA.

The religious revival which take place in the later eighteenth century was important to the emerging industrial bourgeoisie.

Methodism begins to acquire respectability, and the middle class in industrial areas take advantage of the organizing experience to be gained from Methodist meetings which relies upon lay leadership and devolution of responsibility.

Success in industry is also more likely to result from the sort of skills that are emphasized in dissenting schools.

The subject of non-conformism and its influence on bourgeois ballad is a big one.

Before the industrial revolution, middle-class town-dwellers are:

(a) merchants
(b) artisans, or
(c) shopkeepers.

Social change is set in motion by the cotton industry, and the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton which, together with Watt's steam-engine, created the factory system.

Because of steam power, the British coal deposits are of immense significance, and scores of mines are  opened.

The mining of copper and iron is needed, too, for the production of the machinery itself.

Arkwright was a typical example of the new industrial hero.

Arkwright  is  a Preston barber in 1768, a mill owner in 1771, and thereafter he is continually adding to his accumulation of capital the royalties he receives from machinery built to his patents -- whether or not the invention he had patented is actually one of his own.

When British industrial production figures begin to climb, war is once more to prove a decisive factor in crushing foreign competition and securing captive markets (1793-1815).

A transformation in political and intellectual life is indicated by the birth of classical economics.

Adam Smith attacks mercantilism and advocates free trade in "The Wealth of Nations" (1776) and, reduces politics, parties, religion, in short everything to economic categories.

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In music, the effects of bourgeois democratic ideas are seen in a

(a) deliberate popularization and
(b) simplification of style.

Even a composer like Haydn, who spends most of his life in employment at the Esterhazy court, working within the traditions of aristocratic musical entertainment, reveals his republican sympathies by deliberately accommodating himself to this democratic tendency in his London Symphonies of 1791-5 (e.g. the slow movement of the Surprise Symphony, No. 94).

Haydn also writes twelve canzonets to English words, one of which,

"My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair"

became a firm favourite in the drawing-room repertoire. (The words are rather trite).

Haydn is much influenced by the music of Handel which he heard, and the kind of simple descriptive effects that can be traced from a work like Handel's "Israel in Egypt" to Haydn's "The Creation" were again a beloved feature of bourgeois ballad

The middle class does not reach a position of political dominance over-night, but significant milestones are

(a) 1832, when the Reform Bill was passed
(b) the boom in railway investment (essential for the development of capital-goods industries like iron and coal) which helped to shake off the 1842 depression, and
(c) the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.

The importance of the Reform agitation is the new polarize in of class antagonism between labourers and capitalists (rather than labour ind aristocracy) which follows.

Chartism as the inevitable result of this.

In treating the house of the third estate as the house of the people, and not as the house of a privileged class, the ministry and parliament of 1831 virtually concedes the principal of universal suffrage its immediate and inevitable result was Chartism.

The importance of riding out the 1842 depression is that afterwards Britain is no longer dependent on one main industrialized sector, and the ensuing boom years are a contributing factor in setting English unrest apart from that on the continent in 1848.

The importance of the repeal of the corn laws is that it gives a victory to the industrial bourgeoisie over the landed aristocracy, leaving the latter economically and politically weaker.

The line from 1832 to Chartism is not a haphazard pendulum alteration of "political" and "economic" agitations but a direct progression.



Birnie, A. An Economic History of the British Isles, London: Methuen: 1935.

Buck, P. C. The Oxford Song Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1931.

Burney, C. A General History of Music (1776), reprint of 1789 edn. New York: Dover, 1957.

Durfey, T., Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy. final edn of 6 vols. London, 1719-20.

Kalischer, A. C. Beethoven's Letters. Trans. J. S. Shedlock. New York: Dover, 1972.

Thomson, W. Orpheus Caledonius. London, 1725—26.